A STRANGE BEQUEST

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19827, 29 April 1927, Page 8

A STRANGE BEQUEST

PILL RECIPE OVER THREE HUNDRED YEARS OLD. A strange bequest is contained in the will of the late Mrs Penelope Christie, of llastbourne, says a correspondent of the Manchester Guardian. It is “the recipe for the pills known as Dr. Anderson’s true Scots Pills.” The doctor was an ancestor of the testatrix. An unsigned and scanty notice of Dr. Patrick Anderson, in the “D.N.B. ” is silent as to the dates of his birth and death. It picks him up as a practising physician in Edinburgh in 1618, and. drops him (again—still in that vocation—in 1635. In the meantime ho had written a number of learned medical find historical works, tho latter including a “History of Scotland,” in MS. from the time at which it was left off by Hector Boeco (Boethius) until his own time. The recipe for the’ pills, he says, came from Venice. One of his works, a satrical poem, entitled “The Copic of a Baron’s Court,” was reprinted in 1821, and fi. copy of the reprint (which is rare) is in the Manchester Reference Library. This book gives a better account of him than the “D.N.8.” In 1686 lhe recipe was “communicate” by his daughter, Mrs. Katherine Anderson, to Mr. Thomas Weir, surgeon, who succeeded him and occupied the same house. In .1821, according to the reprint, tho pills were still made and sold on the same premises; and in 184,3, says the Dictioufery, they were still made and sold ia Edinburgh. Anderson was Charles the First’s physician when in Edinburgh, and a reputed Van Dyck portrait of the King, given by His Majesty to the doctor, is left by Mrs. Christie to the National Portrait Gallery.